Network problems continue to plague Bank of America

Network connection problems slow the online banking service to a crawl for its fourth-straight day of sporadic outages and slow service.

3 January 200212:43 am GMT

Network connection problems slowed Bank of America's online
banking service to a crawl on Friday, its fourth-straight day of sporadic
outages and slow service.

The site slowdown affected only California customers on Friday, unlike
Thursday's hour-long, nationwide outage, company representatives said.
California customers faced similar difficulties accessing the site
Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Our techs are working on the problem rapidly," company spokeswoman
Eloise Hale said. "We know our customers are being inconvenienced."

Hale blamed the site's slow response on the same network problems that
slowed service earlier in the week and caused Thursday's outage. She denied
that Bank of America is experiencing a hacker attack and said that the
company had not performed any upgrades to the site recently that might have
precipitated the slowdown or outage.

The company's online banking site for California customers was down for
about three hours Thursday and went down again in the afternoon, company
representatives said. Meanwhile, the company's online banking services
suffered a nationwide outage from at least 11:45 a.m. PT to 12:45 p.m. PT,
company representatives said.

The outages come after Bank of America's California online banking customers
experienced problems for two days while using the site. Although the
California banking site did not suffer an outage on Tuesday or Wednesday,
the same network problems slowed the delivery of pages and made it difficult
for many customers to log on to their accounts.

On Friday, customers were timed out on their Web browsers before being able
to access their accounts.